What is Vine and how does Vine work?

What is Vine?

The latest and greatest product featuring close connections to Twitter is called Vine.

We have long blogged about how increased bandwidth will drive the development of new social networks and new methods of communicating within the existing networks.

Twitter took off because it was short and sweet…and mobile. It is no great secret that tweets are short because they were designed to be texted form a mobile phone using SMS. As the bandwidth grew they added pictures and video. Maybe the hope with Vine is the same.

How does Vine work?

Vine is interesting because it takes the concept of shortening a paragraph of text and applies it to video. You can take a short video and then reduce it to a series of clips to fit in a 6 second timeframe.

Another trend which is emerging is mobile only sites and apps and Vine is an example of this – there is no Vine website as such.

Much usage of social networks has migrated to smartphones and tablets and this is also driving other traffic. You can use hashtags to share in Vine, and this is also closely aligned to the Twitter way of doing things.

Will Vine take off?

We have a mixed opinion on this.

Social networks are great for sharing things that have just happened. We are telling stories and creating images for people, of things that have already occurred in our lives. Vine differs from this because we don’t record a constant stream of our lives in real time.

Effectively, you are having to contrive a short clip and therefore at least for now, it fits into the category of quirky and niche. Who can create the most viral video? How can it be used for marketing?

How would you share a story or event that has just happened?

It is actually easier and quicker to explain a story in text form than to recreate it in a video. Of course this will change once we are video recording our entire lives in real time and can rewind the last few minutes to make a clip to share with others.

Until that happens, we think that the fundamental idea behind Vine is good, but it fills a niche that won’t make it mainstream for a long time.

What do you think? Have you tried Vine yet? What were your thoughts? Let us know in the comments below.

Jim Lawrenson is the founder of KnowledgeBank, a direct, digital and social media marketing agency based in the UK. During the last 15 years, he has led the marketing world in developing innovative and pioneering new marketing approaches, with a particular focus on b2b marketing. You can find him on [url=http://plus.google.com/118166889443627171089?rel=author]Google+[/url]